Monday, February 2, 2015

Can We Get To The Bottom Of This?

If you followed the link here from today's comic, you may have just experienced an infinite scroll. If not, I'm sure you've experienced it on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. No matter how far down on the page you go, more stuff keeps getting added to the bottom. You can never reach the end!

Obviously, the comic today invokes the stuck-in-a-loop element from the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day as well as the tendency for web pages to scroll forever these days. The "invention" of the infinite scroll web page was a response to the rise in mobile web access. It is more natural to keep moving your thumb to access more information than it is to touch "previous" or "next" buttons.

If you want to add the infinite scroll element to your own web application, be careful. As a design paradigm, it doesn't work for all situations. Consider what type of information is to be displayed. Will all data be of equal relevance, or will the most important be near the top? Is the data on a timeline? Facebook and Twitter show you the newest items at the top (more or less) and the more you scroll, the farther back in time you go. They make some exceptions to that in the case of conversations because most people want to read the beginning before the end. Also, consider how navigation is affected. In my comic, the links to this blog, the social media buttons, and the previous/next navigation links are at the bottom of the page. I had to make special accommodations for today's comic in the form of a fixed-position panel at the bottom than can be shown and hidden. You could have a similar issue if your navigation is at the top and your user has scrolled 4800 feet down on the page. One final issue is that if your dynamically-added content waaaaay down on the page is a link to something else, the user might be disappointed when the use the back button and don't really go back to the same place they left.

If you're okay with all those issues and want to make your own page scroll forever, it is very easy to do with jQuery. Here is an example of what I did for my comic.

My code sets up a function that will listen for scroll events on the window. The value returned from scrollTop() will be the number of pixels hidden from view due to the page scrolling down. Initially, I want to add more data when the user scrolls past 300 pixels. But as I add more data, the point at which I want to add more data will increase as well. Typically, the data you want to add will come from your server via an asynchronous call - so make sure you start the process before the user gets the whole way to to bottom to ensure you get it added in time.

If you want to address the navigation issue as well, I like to sometimes use the Affix tool that comes with Twitter Bootstrap. I make use of it in my comic editor even - though it doesn't scroll forever, there are some things I like to keep visible on the page at all times, no matter how far down I have to go. It's extremely simple to set up on your Bootstrap-enabled page.

As soon as the page loads, the Bootstrap JavaScript adds the affix-top class to your element. What that means is totally up to you - in my example I specify the affix-top class to mean the element has a fixed position 110 pixels from the top of the page and 8 pixels from the left. When the user scrolls down farther than the value given in the data-offset-top attribute, 50 pixels in my example, the affix-top class is removed and replaced with the affix class. Again, what this means is up to you. Bootstrap specifies "position: fixed" but nothing more. In my CSS, I specify the position as 8 pixels from the top and 8 from the left. That will keep it in view no matter how far the page is scrolled. When you scroll back up to the top, Bootstrap reverses the process and puts the affix-top class back on in place of the affix class.

If you're in the mood for a scroll that's a little more finite, there's always One Mile Scroll. Which is, you know, one mile. Slightly shorter than infinity.